Most online faculty know that discussion is one of the biggest advantages of online education. The increased think-time afforded by the asynchronous environment, coupled with the absence of public speaking fears, produces far deeper discussion than is usually found in face-to-face courses.

Most online faculty know that discussion is one of the biggest advantages of online education. The increased think-time afforded by the asynchronous environment, coupled with the absence of public speaking fears, produces far deeper discussion than is usually found in face-to-face courses.

But many faculty undermine this natural advantage by crafting poor discussion questions. The number one mistake is to confuse a discussion question with an essay topic. What are the three criteria used to judge whether patients are competent to make a medical decision for themselves? is not a discussion question. It’s an essay question and should be left to an essay assignment. I’ve also seen instructors turn discussion into research assignments by requiring students to cite a certain number of outside sources in order to get full credit.

I’ve come to believe that crafting good online discussion questions is just plain hard and instructors fall back on essay questions for lack of better ideas. Below are some question types that will help generate real discussion.

Case study
Case studies are an ideal way to illuminate the practical consequences of different concepts. For example, in a medical ethics course I used the following:

A 72-year-old man is admitted to the hospital for a kidney transplant. His daughter is brought in as the best available match as a donor. As the man’s doctor, you discover from the pre-op lab work that the daughter is not a suitable donor because she is not his biological daughter. What, if anything, do you tell the man, his wife, or the daughter?

This example provides an ideal way to explore how fundamental principles of privacy, physician honesty, and shielding a patient from harm collide in the real world. The question allows for a variety of answers, each of which takes the students deeper into the fundamental issues being taught in the course.

Controversy
Another good discussion device is to generate controversy with a statement that challenges common orthodoxy. Consider this question in an information security class:

A fundamental tenet of information security is that you must force the user to periodically change his or her password. But this practice actually undermines security. With constantly changing passwords, users are forced to write them down in an easy-to-find location or use an easy-to-guess algorithm (my street address followed by a ‘1,’ then changed to a ‘2,’ then changed to a ‘3,’ etc.). We are better off letting users keep the same password indefinitely. Do you agree?

Also important is that a controversial statement needs to draw a fine line that allows for reasonable positions on both sides of the issue. It’s not helpful to say something patently outrageous, such as “Passwords should not be required at all.” A good statement that challenges what is being presented in the readings demonstrates that the instructor considers the students co-investigators and allows them to draw upon their wider knowledge base to engage the issues.

Transfer
It’s been argued that the highest form of understanding is demonstrated through transfer of principles to new situations. For example, I’ve taught the classic “Prisoners’ Dilemma” (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/PRISDIL.html) as part of my ethics and political theory courses. If you are not familiar with it, the upshot is that there are situations in which the rational choice for each individual involved leads to a situation that is not optimal for anyone. Think of it as the “invisible hand” in reverse.

The concept was developed as a way to understand political structures, but once you understand the concept—really understand it—you find that a lot of ordinary situations are prisoners’ dilemmas. I’m a bike racer, and I realized that bike races are examples of the prisoners’ dilemma. So one type of discussion question is to demonstrate the application of a concept to an entirely different situation and ask students to generate their own examples. Students can then evaluate how well the others’ examples illustrate the concept.

The summary
A good way to end discussion threads is to post a summary of the main points as well as your thoughts on them. Revisiting material is good for retention, and these summaries demonstrate that you are keeping abreast of the discussion. Alternatively, you can assign different students to post summaries of each discussion.

I like to do video summaries. Something about hearing a voice and seeing a face captures our attention. It requires only a cheap webcam and a few minutes of my time. Don’t toil over getting it perfect—just speak your mind for a few minutes, and post it as a video.

Sustained, high-quality student participation usually doesn’t happen on its own in the online learning environment. The instructor needs to model participation, create assignments that encourage it, and foster an environment that supports it. Here are some ways that I promote student participation in my online courses.

Sustained, high-quality student participation usually doesn’t happen on its own in the online learning environment. The instructor needs to model participation, create assignments that encourage it, and foster an environment that supports it. Here are some ways that I promote student participation in my online courses.

Use discussions as assignments. Rather than assigning an overall participation grade, I treat each one-to-two-week discussion as an assignment. The discussion assignment is typically tied to an independent assignment. For the discussion portion, each student reviews the work of one or two classmates and is required to post comments and/or questions. The independent assignment is worth 20 points and the associated discussion assignment is worth 10 points.

I find that students do not necessarily need much preparation to interact in these discussion forums after I model participation for them. I post substantive comments, and in my modeling I never have yes or no questions.

Create informal conversation spaces. The assignment and discussion forums are not the only forums in my courses. I have two other forums: The Coffee Shop and The Teacher’s Room. The Coffee Shop is for students to engage with each other on topics other than the content of the course, which helps build community and makes students feel comfortable with each other. The personal relationships built there can carry over into the content-related forums, and I think this informal space helps make posting in all forums feel safer.

The Teacher’s Room is for administrative issues and questions and comments about current and past assignments. I advise students to check this forum regularly for important information, and I encourage students to answer each other’s questions there. Sometimes students will post additional resources or they’ll bring up issues that aren’t necessarily related to the current week, but they add to the learning experience.

Encourage and recognize go-getters. In each course there are typically two to four students (out of 15) who are real go-getters. They help set the tone of the course and can be very helpful in getting others to participate. I’ll encourage their participation by sending them private emails saying something like “I really like what you had to say about … . Thanks for contributing.” I’ll also recognize them publicly through an announcement in The Teacher’s Room or an email to the entire class when I feel that a student has made an insightful comment about the course content.

Use student moderators. After I have moderated the discussion forum for three or four assignments, I turn moderating duties over to the students so that they become facilitators of the conversation, which creates a positive learning environment in terms of power-sharing, involvement, and ownership of the course.

Students can select which forum topic and week they would like to moderate on a first-come, first-served basis. The responsibilities are described in the instructions, and a week before they are to moderate I send out a reminder about their responsibilities, which include:

Focusing the discussion on course content

Encouraging new ideas

Initiating further discussion through questions or observations

Finding and communicating unifying threads

Drawing attention to opposing perspectives

Summarizing and posting a report about the discussion

I let the student moderators take the lead. I do not participate until the latter part of the week’s assignment, but I do participate because it’s important that the students don’t feel abandoned by the instructor, particularly when the discussion is facilitated by a student who may not be very confident in the role.

An interesting dynamic occurs when students moderate. Students who either have moderated already or who will moderate in the future are very supportive because they’ve been in the hot seat or will be there soon.

Another wonderful quality of having student moderators is that they bring a different perspective to the course. I look at the content in a certain way. Student moderators—especially good ones—will often look at the content from a different perspective. They will raise topics that I would never have thought of talking about. They bring in different ideas—some do extra research to make sure they are well informed—and the conversation often goes off in impressive directions.

Students are usually quite positive about the moderating experience. When I survey my students, they typically say that moderating deepens their understanding of the content, that they enjoy taking on a leadership role, and that they see the benefit of having others’ viewpoints brought to the forefront.

Joan Thormann is a professor in the Division of Educational Technology at Lesley University and coauthor of The Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Designing and Teaching Online Courses.

Consideration of convenience and flexibility typically leads instructors and instructional designers to favor asynchronous over synchronous learning. But given the potential benefits of synchronous communication, perhaps it’s time to rethink the 100 percent asynchronous course.

Consideration of convenience and flexibility typically leads instructors and instructional designers to favor asynchronous over synchronous learning. But given the potential benefits of synchronous communication, perhaps it’s time to rethink the 100 percent asynchronous course.

At St. Leo University, education professors Carol Todd and Keya Mukherjee have been using Elluminate, a platform that enables synchronous audio, video, and text chat as well as various collaboration tools to enhance their asynchronous online, hybrid, and face-to-face courses. In a study of their use of this synchronous tool that included quantitative and qualitative data, they found that synchronous interaction can improve community.

These two professors use Elluminate for specific pedagogical reasons, not just for building community; however, desire for community building and reducing isolation prompted them to use this tool. “When I first came to [online teaching] from teaching face-to-face courses, one of the areas I struggled with was the silo effect. Students missed the community of the face-to-face courses. That’s why I started looking at using the [online learning space] to build a learning community, so students are not just silos working from behind their computers and turning in individual pieces of work,” Mukherjee says.

Mukherjee holds synchronous sessions once a week in her online courses. Each 30-to-45-minute session has an instructional agenda. She spends approximately 10 minutes answering questions related to assignments, and the rest of the time is spent on “extending the instruction of the online module,” which might include additional readings, jigsaws, viewing video, or discussion.

Similarly, Todd uses Elluminate sessions to

enhance the instruction in the online modules;

explain assignments and rubrics; and

build community.

Synchronous sessions are optional in both instructors’ courses, and while attendance varies, they typically get 80 percent attendance rates, presumably because students find these synchronous sessions valuable. (Recordings of each session are available for those who don’t attend.) Students can participate via text chat, audio, or video—depending on their access to the various technologies.

Evidence of community
Based on observation and feedback from students, evidence of the effects of synchronous sessions on community emerges. For example, in a recent synchronous session at the end of one of Todd’s courses, students had a few questions regarding the last assignment, but most of the conversation focused on the community aspects of the synchronous sessions. “You could see in the chat and listen to their conversation and understand that they had built these relationships with each other that they would not have had the opportunity to build strictly [asynchronously] online,” Todd says.

In addition to observations, Todd and Mukherjee asked students Likert scale and open-ended questions about their experience with these synchronous sessions. “Over and over again in different ways, [students] talked about how there was no more social isolation.”

Todd also gathered data on classes before and after using Elluminate. She teaches the first and last classes in the program and looked at the data and end-of-course evaluations in the first class pre- and post-Elluminate and the last class pre- and post-Elluminate. She found in these two courses, especially in the first class, that post-Elluminate scores were higher than pre-Elluminate scores in terms of student interest and learning.

In end-of-course evaluations, ratings of communication in particular improved. “Communication had always been my weakest area in my end-of-course evaluations prior to using Elluminate. I can no longer say that,” Todd says.

An added benefit
When online instructors teach courses that they had no part in developing, their role can be rather limited, providing guidance and feedback in discussions and on assignments. However, online instructors have a wealth of experience and expertise in the subjects they teach that often does not come across to students.

Synchronous sessions can give adjuncts a voice and provide an opportunity for them to share their specialized knowledge, experience, and opinions in a way that might not necessarily come across as effectively via email or discussion boards, Mukherjee says.

Advice for getting startedBe flexible. You won’t find a time that works for everyone. Pick a time and offer recordings to those who cannot attend. Given the nature of online learning, it would be difficult to require attendance, but if you make the experience valuable, students will make an effort to be present at the live session.

Have an agenda. “To become interactive, you need each session, however small, to have an agenda that links to the overall course, to the particular module. And you need to tell the students, ‘I’m going to enhance the instructional module.’ There needs to be a draw. There needs to be a reason. My suggestion would be that all instructors need to design something that is beyond what was in the module as a way for students to see there is value in this session. Using it for office hours is not in my experience a very successful venture,” Mukherjee says.

The agenda should be based partly on students’ needs, Todd says. “When I invite my students to come, I have an agenda, but I also meet them where they are in the course. You have to have an agenda, whether it’s answering questions, instructing, or clarifying. I do all of these, and I have an agenda I share with my students.”

Make it compelling. One of the distinguishing features of online learning is convenience, which was and continues to be a major attraction for students. However, Mukherjee believes that students will rearrange their schedules to accommodate worthwhile synchronous sessions. “People are willing to do it if they see it as meaningful. The synchronous sessions have to carry meaning and weight, and students must see the connection between the learning going on in the module and the synchronous session,” she says.

As an online instructor, I require my students to engage in weekly discussion forums. In the online college environment, discussion forums are designed to simulate a professor and his or her students engaged in a traditional classroom discussion. Students respond to a question and then reply to the responses of their classmates. The point is to keep the discussion moving, keep students engaged in the topic for the week, and facilitate learning.

As an online instructor, I require my students to engage in weekly discussion forums. In the online college environment, discussion forums are designed to simulate a professor and his or her students engaged in a traditional classroom discussion. Students respond to a question and then reply to the responses of their classmates. The point is to keep the discussion moving, keep students engaged in the topic for the week, and facilitate learning.

Anyone who has taught online for any length of time has dealt with the issue of plagiarism. The definition of plagiarism does not change because of the reason or rationale. Certainly, some students commit inadvertent plagiarism because of not properly acknowledging sources, or possibly out of an unawareness of the rules of academic integrity, yet some instances of plagiarism are intentional. Regardless of the reason, copying and pasting material into the discussion forum is not uncommon. We can combat plagiarism by using originality-verifying software, by increasing the students’ knowledge of using proper citations, and by levying steep penalties (awarding a zero grade, submitting the issue to the university’s academic integrity department, etc.). Assuming we have properly trained our students to avoid all forms of plagiarism, does that solve the issue of originality? The answer is no. I have past and present students that can string together a set of quotes, all properly cited, to create a discussion forum response or even a three-page paper.

Tell me in your own words
Why demand originality? In relating to a traditional classroom discussion, do students respond to the professor’s question by opening up the textbook or searching for the answer on the Internet and then reading off the answer? Some might try, but by asking questions the professor is looking to see if the students grasp the discussed concept, not if they know how and where to find the answer.

Online students have the advantage of reflection time, along with having the textbook and Internet search engine open when responding to discussion questions. With a few simple clicks, virtually any question can be answered by searching the Internet. Once again, why demand originality? Classroom learning takes place when students are required to think; that’s a few steps beyond clicking copy and paste. As instructors, we should encourage our students to be resourceful and to learn the skills of locating and incorporating scholarly literature into their work. But we also must instill the learning value of synthesizing sources in such a manner that produces evidence of gained knowledge.

In demanding originality, we must convey that we are not seeking baseless opinions. Quality responses reveal that the student has learned the material and can carry on an intelligent discussion regarding the topic. If properly used, incorporating scholarly sources into a discussion response strengthens the student’s work, yet a heavy reliance on the words of others dramatically lowers the academic quality of the student’s answer. Is including a short quote in a discussion response an unpardonable offense? No, but I hold to the notion that a quote should be included only when there is no other viable wording to convey the original author’s meaning or intent. I try to keep the quote doors closed because when we open them up, students rationally make the assumption that if one quote is fine, then 10 quotes fills up more word count.

Students must employ some cognitive skills to assemble a discussion response or write a paper. As instructors, we elevate the propensity of students engaging in critical thinking when we demand originality. Regurgitating the words of others without being required to grasp the meaning of the original author’s theory or finding does little to build a student’s ability to think. Although some students are only in pursuit of a passing grade, a good portion of our students are expecting us to prepare them for a professional career. I think we fall short of the mark when we allow students to wander through our course without instilling the virtue of integrity and promoting the ability to critically analyze a topic.

Nate Cottle, professor of human environmental sciences at the University of Central Oklahoma, uses the process approach to learning as delineated by William Horton (2006) in his online and blended courses. Cottle spoke to Online Classroom about using this model. “Learning isn’t something that has to be confined to the classroom, and so as I teach blended classes, I think the more I can involve the students in learning and the more contexts I can involve them in, the more they’re going to learn,” he said. “The idea is to get them to slowly digest the information in different ways and to engage in different activities so that by the time the course comes to an end, they can apply the knowledge they have learned. That’s the ultimate goal: to get them to be in a state where they can apply the knowledge.”

Nate Cottle, professor of human environmental sciences at the University of Central Oklahoma, uses the process approach to learning as delineated by William Horton (2006) in his online and blended courses. Cottle spoke to Online Classroom about using this model. “Learning isn’t something that has to be confined to the classroom, and so as I teach blended classes, I think the more I can involve the students in learning and the more contexts I can involve them in, the more they’re going to learn,” he said. “The idea is to get them to slowly digest the information in different ways and to engage in different activities so that by the time the course comes to an end, they can apply the knowledge they have learned. That’s the ultimate goal: to get them to be in a state where they can apply the knowledge.”

The process model consists of three stages:

Absorb—During this stage, students are gaining basic knowledge. This can include reading a chapter in the textbook.

Do—Students then engage in an activity such as a discussion before the face-to-face session (in the case of a blended course) or a synchronous online session in the case of a totally online course.

Connect—Students apply knowledge to real-world situations.

OC: How do you use this approach in your courses?

Cottle: I use that basic model that Horton laid out, and I like that because the process is gradual, but it’s also hierarchical—[students] are moving up. During the absorb stage, they’re just trying to get the basic material. In some cases it would be reading the chapter and then doing some type of activity before coming to class. Instead of having them do discussion after class, I’ve been having them do a discussion before class where they’re responding to the material and interacting with their fellow students.

Instead of meeting three times a week, we’ll meet once a week, and the content they’ve already provided allows me then to have something that I can use during the in-class session. This is the do stage, which becomes focused on applying the material. … As people redesign courses, I think the question they have to ask themselves is, “What would I like to do in class but never have time to do?” The blended approach allows someone to do something in class that they may have never thought they would have been able to do because they’ve got to lecture, they’ve got to get through the material. And so students do this online lesson and read this book and then answer a question that demonstrates to me that they already know the knowledge and now they can do something with it. In-class activities would be anything like debate, or you can have them do all kinds of different interactions to get them processing the material more and more. It may be that you’re giving them a case study, a simulation, or something that they have to be able to apply the knowledge to.

The last stage is the connect stage. That’s where I think [the content] is solidified or makes sense to them. I really see that as a reflection, and so what they have to do then is be able to reflect or critique or draw some conclusions about how this material affects their lives or the subject they’re studying. The more that I can get students to think about the material and to apply it to different activities before, during, and after class, the more learning takes place. So the goal is to get them to think about it much more than they would by just walking into class and sitting down and saying “Teach me.”

OC: Do you find that students need to be prepared for this approach?

Cottle: They’re used to walking into class—maybe having read [or] maybe not—and then having the instructor do everything. It’s a big paradigm shift for them to realize, “Not only do I have to do something before I come to class, but I’m responsible for this material. And if I don’t know it, then when it comes to these activities I won’t be able to do it.” So I think it empowers students, and it requires them to be more responsible about reading the book [and] about doing those things they need to do before they come to the classroom.

OC: Do you do this exclusively as a blended approach or also online?

Cottle: I think it can be done online. … I think it just makes an online class a little bit more synchronous. And in some ways it draws back from the approach, but it certainly is something that you can do.

OC: Would you have synchronous sessions in online courses to simulate what goes on in face-to-face sessions?

Cottle: I think that’s a great way to do that. It allows you to come together. And there are more and more technologies out there that allow you to bring a small group together to have a discussion or to [collaborate]. It’s tough to schedule. The difference in the two approaches is [that] in one they’ve already committed to a time, and in the other they’re going to have to find a time that fits. As an instructor, I think you have to be more flexible in meeting their needs and providing them different opportunities for that to happen.

OC: What do students tell you about this approach?

Cottle: Some of them say it’s more difficult, that [I’m asking them] to do more than other teachers [do]. And then on the back side I get, “I’ve learned more than I have in any other class.” So it is something that challenges them, [and] when they rise to that challenge, they feel rewarded for it. There is some initial push back, but I think in the end students recognize that having to do this is important. After working in a social services setting … a lot of students come back and say, “I was so glad I was able to apply this to a situation because this happened after graduation … [after] getting a job, they’re asking me to do these things I’ve learned in class, so at least I have a starting point to go from.” And so it really becomes what we at the University of Central Oklahoma call transformative learning—where you change the person as a result of learning and that person then is prepared for the discipline that they are engaging in in their careers.

OC: From the instructor’s or instructional designer’s perspective, what is involved in redesigning a course in this manner?

Cottle: I think the first step is to not try to make a blended or online class the same as what you do in a live class. I think you have to start from the learning objectives and ask, “What do I want to accomplish?” Allow yourself to do whatever it may be that will accomplish those learning outcomes in either the blended or online environment. There are things that you can do online that you could never do in a class. There are opportunities and tools out there, and so really to say, “Well let’s just take what I do in class and move it online,” is somewhat shortsighted. You have to ask, “How will the students be different after this class?” Then ask: “What activities do I need to put together? What readings do I need them to have access to in order to reach that outcome?” When you think about course redesign, it’s starting from scratch rather than “This is what I do in a live class; let me just do a little bit of that online.” You’ve got to start and say: “What do they need to know? What do they need to absorb? How can I have them apply it? And how can they connect it?”

The discussion board in Kathleen Lowney’s large blended (or hybrid) section of introduction to sociology at Valdosta State University wasn’t serving its intended purpose of engaging learners with the content and preparing them for face-to-face class sessions. She tried dividing the students into smaller discussion groups of 50 and then 20, and the results were the same: the weaker students waited until the last minute and essentially repeated what the better students had posted previously. When she replaced the public discussions with private journals, the quality of students’ posts improved, as did their grades.

The discussion board in Kathleen Lowney’s large blended (or hybrid) section of introduction to sociology at Valdosta State University wasn’t serving its intended purpose of engaging learners with the content and preparing them for face-to-face class sessions. She tried dividing the students into smaller discussion groups of 50 and then 20, and the results were the same: the weaker students waited until the last minute and essentially repeated what the better students had posted previously. When she replaced the public discussions with private journals, the quality of students’ posts improved, as did their grades.

Lowney’s course is a “supersection” hybrid that has an enrollment of 150 to 300 students and meets Tuesdays and Thursdays with a significant online component. She had one discussion per week that required students to read 50 percent of their classmates’ posts and contribute to the discussion to prepare them for the next class session.

“I began to notice that the academically stronger students would post early; the weaker students tended to post in the last 12 hours of a seven-day window, and many of their posts, while not quite taken word-for-word from the stronger students, were pretty close. It looked [as though] they were waiting for the stronger students to post in these open discussions to figure out what the answers were. Not everybody was engaging with the material in the way that I wanted them to engage with it,” Lowney says.

She also observed that students who posted earlier and engaged in original thinking did better on tests. Even in smaller groups the same “free rider” problem occurred, and Lowney had the additional problem of managing multiple discussions. (While Blackboard makes it easy to divide students into groups and present the same discussion prompt, knowing which comment she made in which group proved to be a challenge.)

Lowney now assigns a private prewrite, which asks students to apply concepts. Students do not see each other’s posts, and Lowney responds to each, offering comments that help prepare for the in-class discussion.

She also says that this format has improved students’ engagement with the material. “I wouldn’t say the weaker students are always a lot stronger than they were, but what I’m seeing is that my weaker students’ test scores have made a steady improvement from when I had the open, public discussion,” Lowney says.

In addition to improved test scores, Lowney has observed improved interaction in the face-to-face sessions. “Classes are much more engaging because I know that they’ve had to read the material before and engage with it,” Lowney says. “I’m getting more questions in class because I’m priming the pump with my comments.”

Of course, making these prewrites private eliminates the benefits of writing for and receiving feedback from peers. One way that Lowney addresses this issue is by sharing (anonymously) sample private prewrites in class, highlighting common mistakes and things done well. “I’ll build that into my PowerPoint and say, ‘This is something that cropped up a lot.’ Most students will see their work at some point in one of the PowerPoints, and I’ll share good examples as well, especially early in the semester so that I can model a successful answer and ask students to tear it apart and see what made it successful,” Lowney says.

These private prewrites are more work for the students and the instructor. Responding to each prewrite is quite time-intensive for Lowney, particularly in such high-enrollment courses. And one of the challenges is providing feedback to students before the in-class discussion. “If you’re not able to get them all graded, you can get a sample graded so you can use them in the lecture the next day. This makes it seem as though it’s not just busywork,” Lowney says.

To help motivate students to take these prewrites seriously, Lowney shares with them data that shows how grades have improved since she began using this approach.

Each module still has an open discussion where students can post messages or ask questions, but students rarely use it. While this is not really an issue in a hybrid course where students have opportunities for face-to-face interaction with peers, it would be an issue in a fully online course. That said, Lowney does see the potential for limited use of this technique in totally online courses. “If I were going to have two assignments a week, I’d have one private and one open, because I do think there needs to be some community in an online course that an open discussion allows for,” she says.

Lowney has not tried this approach in upper-division courses, but she speculates that she might take more of a backseat role in these discussions. She sees the merit of including open discussions in introductory courses, perhaps with more private interaction in upper-level courses. “It depends on what you’re teaching. What are your goals? What’s the rest of the course like? What are your other assignments?” Lowney says.

]]>http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/asynchronous-learning-and-trends/private-journal-replaces-discussion-forum-in-blended-course/feed/2Three Ways to Change up Your Online Discussion Board Promptshttp://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/asynchronous-learning-and-trends/three-ways-to-change-up-your-online-discussion-board-prompts/
http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/asynchronous-learning-and-trends/three-ways-to-change-up-your-online-discussion-board-prompts/#commentsThu, 07 Mar 2013 12:39:53 +0000http://www.facultyfocus.com/?p=38939Are you having trouble getting students to participate in online discussions? Consider using other types of prompts in addition to the typical open-ended question. Maria Ammar, assistant English professor at Frederick Community College, uses the following prompts in her English as a second language course and recommends them for other types of courses:

]]>Are you having trouble getting students to participate in online discussions? Consider using other types of prompts in addition to the typical open-ended question. Maria Ammar, assistant English professor at Frederick Community College, uses the following prompts in her English as a second language course and recommends them for other types of courses:

Articles—Post an article in the discussion board and have students do an activity related to its content. This gives students more content on which to comment than a typical prompt that consists solely of a question.

Audio—Post an audio prompt. Listening is an integral part of learning a language. It also is a medium that students are comfortable with and find interesting. Ammar has students post their notes on radio broadcasts in a threaded discussion. “Even though everybody is listening to the same [content], they may catch different things,” Ammar says.

Video—Even more engaging is video. Simply post a link to a YouTube video (or one from another source), and ask students to comment or answer an open-ended questions about it.

In courses that are intended to develop students’ writing skills, the discussion board can be an excellent way to get students to write on a regular basis. However, one of the obstacles to students’ full participation in this type of learning is some students’ reluctance to share things that they consider too personal.

One way to address this is to have students write in personal online journals that only the individual student and instructor can access. Ammar does not give students the option of posting in the journal instead of posting to the discussion board. They are both required activities, but some students tend to participate more actively in one or the other.

In some cases the prompt can be the same for the threaded discussion and the journal entry. For example, she once asked students to view an ABC News video of an art project in New York City in which pianos were placed throughout the city for members of the public to play. The video showed interviews with people who played. In the threaded discussion, students summarized the comments of several interviewees, and she asked students write about their personal reflections about the project.

Ammar does not grade online discussion posts or journal entries for grammar or spelling “because I just want to see that they’re able to communicate. I check those things in their [formal] papers.”

]]>Heidi Beezley, instructional technologist at Georgia Perimeter College, strives to instill online courses with active learning, “providing opportunities for students to meaningfully talk and listen, write, read, and reflect on the content, ideas, issues, and concerns of an academic subject” (as defined by Meyers and Jones). To this she adds: “interact[ing] with realia, manipulatives, simulations, etc.”

Educators need to take into account the characteristics of the online classroom when trying to incorporate active learning into online courses, Beezley says. For example, the nonlinear nature of the online classroom and the lack of face-to-face interaction with its visual cues make it difficult to ensure that all learners are experiencing the course in the same manner.

“Face-to-face discussions are linear. Everyone has a shared experience. The conversation slowly builds, and hopefully by the end you’ve moved everyone from one level of understanding to a new level of understanding. In an online environment when you have students participate in a discussion through a discussion board, it’s not linear at all. There’s not necessarily a shared experience,” Beezley says.

Threaded discussion summaries
To help create shared learning experiences, Beezley has students take turns summarizing the threaded discussions. This helps create a common understanding, serves as a means of assessing students’ understanding of the content, and gives them the chance to actively engage with the course content.

Rather than posting these summaries to the discussion board, Beezley has students post them to a course wiki or to Google Docs. This increases the accessibility of the summaries, which can be important for future reference and to enable all the students to edit them in case the student who did the original summary overlooked or misinterpreted key concepts.

Beezley recommends discussing the summary (synchronously or asynchronously) with the students to assess its accuracy and prevent incorrect information from becoming ingrained in students’ minds.

Synchronous collaboration
Beezley is an advocate of synchronous sessions as a way to create active learning opportunities. She uses Wimba, a live classroom program, to facilitate synchronous collaboration, including discussions (chat and/or voice), polling, and breakout rooms in which students can work on shared documents and report back to the entire class.

Beezley prefers to have students actually talk to each other as they collaborate in the breakout rooms. As in a face-to-face classroom, the instructor can visit with each group to ensure that they are going in the right direction.

“If things are going well, I usually leave them to do what they’re doing and know that they’re going to be reporting back when we meet in the main room. I find that I can usually just be the observer because the conversations are going well. I think the trick is to try to pull them back to the main room before they get to the point where the discussion has died down. Sometimes groups may not be done discussing before you pull them all back and ask them to report on whatever they did. [You need to] establish a culture of accountability, making sure that they need to use the time wisely, or they will run out of time and won’t be able to complete the task,” Beezley says.

As in the face-to-face classroom, spontaneous off-topic conversations are likely to occur in the synchronous online environment. While too much of this can detract from the learning experience, a certain amount of it is productive. “Some of my best learning in college occurred while walking out of a classroom when the class was over and asking, ‘Did you understand this part of the lecture? It was confusing to me.’ Conversations like that are hard to have in the online environment. When you put people together in small groups, sometimes they have those kinds of conversations. I think those conversations are a good thing.”

To help facilitate these collaborations, Beezley assigns each student to a base group of students who work together throughout the course. “Instead of having one large group, I like the idea of everyone taking part in the same discussion in small groups of five students who are always working together and talking things through and reporting back to the class.”

It’s a simple understanding check in which the instructor asks students to answer a question in chat and to submit their answers simultaneously on cue. The questions can be simple or complex. They can test recall or higher-order thinking. The key is to have students hit submit simultaneously so everyone’s answer is revealed at the same time.

“As a student I really feared that I would be wrong, because when it’s live there isn’t as much time to think about a response as there would be asynchronously. I think that fear is a healthy thing for students to feel. It raises your level of engagement. It makes you pay attention. It really helped me learn because whenever I was right I felt validated. But when I was wrong, I would pay attention even more.

“When you have that opportunity for the synchronous exchange of ideas, I think the stakes are higher than when it is asynchronous. When it is asynchronous, you have time to think through your responses, and I think that’s a good thing to have those times as well, but I think in that asynchronous event you have to think on your feet and apply what you know quickly. As an instructor it’s a great opportunity to really see where your students are and understand how much they’ve learned,” Beezley says.

When people find out I am an online art history instructor, the most common reaction I get is “How does that work?” Most of the time, people assume that because art is such a visual outlet that somehow the online classroom is not the most appropriate place to teach art. I have to admit, when I was first approached about teaching art history online, I was skeptical as well. But as time and terms wear on, so too does my belief that teaching art asynchronously can be an effective, and dare I say it, better way to teach art history. Here’s why.

When people find out I am an online art history instructor, the most common reaction I get is “How does that work?” Most of the time, people assume that because art is such a visual outlet that somehow the online classroom is not the most appropriate place to teach art. I have to admit, when I was first approached about teaching art history online, I was skeptical as well. But as time and terms wear on, so too does my belief that teaching art asynchronously can be an effective, and dare I say it, better way to teach art history. Here’s why.

Many students thrive the online environment, due in part to the familiarity of the online environment itself as well as the autonomy online education offers. In my experience with online art classes, there are a variety of strategies an instructor can use to teach and assess the historical context and formal/stylistic qualities of art from different periods in art history. With a little preparation and patience, instructors can provide online students a meaningful and memorable experience with art history. I would suggest that a similar approach could work in a whole variety of disciplines.

Part of the effectiveness of art history online derives the framework I set up weeks in advance. To that end, the first and most effective strategy for teaching art history online involves delivering a primer in art vocabulary. In the first week of the course, students are asked to review a PowerPoint lecture that establishes the formal and stylistic criteria for evaluating art. Often, students approach art history with a great deal of anxiety due in part to the status and language of fine art. By equipping students with the language to speak about art in a meaningful way from the start, they feel less intimidated by the art they encounter later in the course. Terms like “line,” “shape,” and “color” are not as menacing when decoded, and students quickly realize they are pretty familiar with the way these elements appear in their own material culture.

Each week students participate in the class through a variety of means, such as doing the readings, reviewing an online lecture, participating in a discussion board forum, writing a summary paper, taking an online quiz, or a combination of activities. When students are assigned to one of the learning activities, they are asked to relate the work or context to their own life in some way. This helps the student develop an understanding of the material scaffolded from their own experiences, thus providing a meaningful connection with what they see.

By design, the asynchronous discussion board forum allows the student ample time to answer the question effectively. When an instructor lectures in a traditional classroom, students usually do not have time to reflect on the instructor’s questions, which can often be met with blank stares (and complementary cricket sounds) or the “What do you want me to see?” response. The asynchronous nature of online courses provides students ample time to consider their own knowledge of the topic as well as refer to their course materials when constructing their answers. It is important to provide the questions well in advance, so the student can discern the most important nuggets from their required readings and accompanying lectures. In essence, as the instructor, I am providing a framework for the student to work from, guiding them toward the most important information.

Lastly, in addition to giving students ample time to confer with their text and instructor-provided resources, asynchronous art history coursework affords students time to complete their own research surrounding the topic. Granted, this can be a bit dangerous, but if the instructor directs the students to an “approved” list of links to virtual museums, videos, social media and academic friendly websites, the student can use the tools most aligned with their own learning style.

Melanie J. Trost is an instructor in the School of Arts and Sciences at Tiffin University. She also teaches in the Language, Literature and Arts Department at Jackson Community College.

Sometimes students in the online environment just need that extra nudge to feel connected in order to truly excel. As instructors, we can facilitate community-building in an asynchronous environment by utilizing synchronous tools, such as Wimba, Skype, Elluminate, and others available to us via our learning management system or outside of the LMS.

Sometimes students in the online environment just need that extra nudge to feel connected in order to truly excel. As instructors, we can facilitate community-building in an asynchronous environment by utilizing synchronous tools, such as Wimba, Skype, Elluminate, and others available to us via our learning management system or outside of the LMS.

Using synchronous tools may at first seem impractical for online instructors. If students are taking online classes, doesn’t that mean they want to be able to work whenever, wherever, with no time or date restrictions? In many cases, yes—but there are times when online students need one-on-one help, and synchronous tools are able to facilitate that support much more effectively than the usual email back-and-forth or phone conversation. I’ve found that when I’ve used synchronous tools with students, they were more willing to ask questions and interact with their fellow students in the classroom afterwards. Let’s explore some reasons why.

Synchronous tools can help humanize the classroom. Instead of words posted on an electronic screen, we become real to our students, not just words or avatars or photos on a screen — we become human.

Setting up open office hours via a synchronous tool allows students to reach out in a specific time window with questions and get a real-time answer. The power of that communication is twofold. First, students immediately get a sense of community. Someone is there, willing to work with them on their concerns and to answer their questions. Secondly, students can still reach out for help using their computer, and do not have to reach for their phones to connect to instructors to hear their voice.

Many synchronous tools allow us to use video or face-to-face chat, allowing the student to see our faces as we speak to them about their direct concern. Visual learners can watch us talk through a problem using video and screen capture or web navigation tools. Screen sharing tools, such as those embedded in Elluminate, allow students to share their screens with us, so we can take a look at a paper draft in process or a math problem that’s only halfway completed.

Both students and instructors are learning while interacting. Communicating in the online classroom is very different than in a traditional face-to-face classroom. Students utilizing synchronous tools to discuss issues with instructors are required to develop a new communication skill set, learning to navigate a different and unique way of communicating to reach the desired result. Similarly, instructors must not only model effective communication with students during the session, but also test and stretch their skill set in working with new technologies to reach out to students effectively. Both instructors and students learn what works and what doesn’t, but instead of doing this individually, they are learning as a team, simultaneously. That distinction is important.

Synchronous tools require real-time teamwork. Both instructors and students must be open and willing to reach out in order to find a solution for an issue, and this requires working together in tandem—brainstorming, discussing, even negotiating. Modeling this for students in the synchronous environment helps students bring it to the asynchronous environment, such as the discussion board or group project areas of the course.

Michelle Kosalka is the program chair for English and Communications at Herzing University Online, and is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She was recently named the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU) 2011 National Teacher of the Year.